0000000000495393
AUTHOR
D. Vignani
Efficiency in the use of natural non-renewable resources from mining and quarrying in Italy. Time series analysis and Economy-wide Material Flows Accounts
Political reasons have been pushing towards a process of decentralization of powers and responsibilities since last twenty years in Italy. The regional management of mining and quarrying (m&q) should be an interesting case study of this change. This process has begun in the ’70s with the Pres. Decree N. 616 of 1977. By examining administrative data and Regional Laws, this paper highlights how misleading is the awareness of policy makers of the real value of raw mineral resources domestically extracted: they seem closer to common goods rather than to public goods. By combining data on local governance with official statistics of Economy-wide Material Flow Accounts (EW-MFA), our econometric a…
Imposte e Governance Regionale in Materia di Cave e Miniere in Italia
Negli ultimi venti anni una crescente attenzione verso le problematiche ambientali ha generato un dibattito sul “green fiscal reform” sia a livello europeo che nei singoli stati membri. Anche in Italia si è assistito ad interventi normativi di natura centrale con la finalità di rivalutare alcuni strumenti a sostegno di politiche per la tutela dell’ambiente naturale. L’ambito delle imposte ambientali si caratterizza per lo stretto collegamento al contesto territoriale. Da un lato, infatti, le esternalità ricadono principalmente sugli abitanti delle aree interessate e dall’altro gli enti locali si trovano nella posizione migliore per valutarle e gestirle con gli strumenti di politica fiscale.…
Local vs. National Environmental Spending: A Stochastic Frontier Analysis
This work studies the impact of public environmental spending in a fiscal federalist framework. The main question is studying when the centralization of this public economic function is welfare improving. Applying the Stochastic Frontier Approach (SFA) on Italian, Portuguese and Slovakian data, the paper tries to test this issue. Our results highlight the superiority of centralized environmental spending with respect to the decentralization of this particular public good.
DOMESTIC MATERIAL CONSUMPTION INDICATOR AND NATURAL RESOURCES: A EUROPEAN ANALYSIS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL KUZNETS CURVE
The study investigates the relation between per capita Domestic Material Consumption indicator (DMC) and per capita income. Economic literature focuses mainly on air, water and land pollution while we consider as environmental degradation the consumption on natural resources extracted from the environment. Using a cross– European panel of countries over the period 2000-2011, our results confirm the absence of an Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) between per capita DMC and per capita GDP both for EU-27 vs. 30 European countries and for Western vs. Eastern European countries. The turning points are so high that it is present a monotonic increasing relation between DMC indicator and GDP.
Measuring water-use in response to climate change: an analysis of the efficiency of Italian crop production system
Official meteo-climatic statistics show the variability of weather conditions. Their effects on socioeconomic and natural environments should be analyzed in multi-dimensional studies. Among sectors, agriculture is expected to be the most sensitive as well as water resources availability. The aim of our analysis is to measure the performance of Italian regions in crop production by estimating both production technology - including a measure of irrigation water used as input - output elasticities and returns to scale and productive efficiency or technical efficiency where rainfalls and temperatures are proxies of CC conditions in the period 2000-2010 at Italian regional level, using the stoch…
Stochastic Frontiers Approach: an Empirical Analysis of Italian Environmental Spending
Using the stochastic frontiers approach (SFA) on a panel of Italian regional data, this paper tries to analyse the optimal design of environmental spending. The main question is, so forth, studying centralization vs decentralization of a public economic function, such as the protection of the environment, in order to improve the welfare of a country. Empirical results on Italy are ambiguous: the changing from a centralized to a decentralized government, giving more autonomy to local units, does not highlight a clear improvement in regional economic performance.